He said it was age bias, but his own emails after being fired suggested otherwise
An employee's own emails, fired off hours after his termination, made no mention of age discrimination. Months later, his account changed, and a human rights tribunal wasn't persuaded.
In a decision released Aug. 20, 2026, Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario member Rosamaria Longo dismissed an age discrimination complaint filed by a former infection prevention and control practitioner against Mackenzie Health Richmond Hill Hospital. Longo found that documented performance problems, not age, were behind the hospital's decision to end the employee's contract during his probationary period.
A string of missed deadlines and mishandled cases
Records entered at the hearing pointed to problems within weeks of a new manager taking over the department. The hospital maintained that the employee did not complete required hand hygiene audits, missed a chickenpox follow-up for three days, and failed to document a patient's ongoing precautions for a separate infection.
A nurse once asked the employee to help remove a visibly ill family member from a unit; he referred the matter to security instead. Longo pointed to further lapses, including missed deadlines for outbreak line lists, a dispute over a colleague's classification of a C. difficile case that later proved correct, and the disclosure of a patient's health information to a building superintendent with no clinical role.
Lab delays, computer outages and being the only practitioner on duty explained the missed deadlines, the employee testified, adding that his clinical judgment on the disputed cases was sound. Longo wrote she did not need to decide whether his explanations were persuasive, only whether performance concerns had genuinely been raised with him. She found that they had.
The manager's alleged remark about young, fresh heads
The employee alleged that his manager repeatedly questioned when he planned to retire, asked whether he dyed his hair to look younger, and encouraged him to move into academia. During a meeting about a delayed infection report, he testified, she said something to the effect that the department needed young, fresh heads, a comment he says he wrote down at the time.
Her own notes from that same meeting, the manager testified, addressed only the delayed infection report, with no reference to age or retirement. She denied making any age-related comments and said she recorded her notes immediately after the meeting concluded.
No colleague was called to corroborate the alleged comments, Longo noted, despite the employee's claim that others in the department had witnessed them. The tribunal found him inconsistent on a related point: he denied that his probation had come up at that meeting, despite his own notes referencing it directly.
The emails sent in the hours after the firing
The employee emailed the hospital's vice-president the same day he was fired, accusing his manager of incompetence and of terminating him so she could hire friends from her previous workplace. A similar email went to another director the next day. Neither mentioned age.
He testified he wrote in good faith, saying he was "confident in my honesty and professional integrity." Longo reasoned that someone raising serious misconduct allegations would likely have raised age discrimination too, had he believed it was a factor. He testified he became convinced age played a role only after his former manager later declined to give him a reference, nearly a year after his termination.
Hiring younger replacement staff did not support an inference of bias, the tribunal found, noting the new hires went through a five-member interview panel and that a simple age gap with a successor is not, on its own, evidence of discrimination. Longo found the employee had not established that "his age was a factor in the decision to terminate his employment." The application was dismissed.
See Baral v. Mackenzie Health Richmond Hill Hospital, 2026 HRTO 1282
